hi guys,i have a booklet that i would like to scan and then convert it to pdf so i can put it up in wirral history,my question is what resolution should i be scanning at?...it is slightly smaller than A4 and has 50 pages so i only want to scan it all once and i have to give it back tommorrow to the person i borrowed it off lol

I scan my material at the highest resolution possible. Each scan is about 3 mg in jpg. format. When you convert to PDF the entire file is compressed anyway. With PDF you can increase the size so scan and keep as original.

600 dpi sound about right ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_scanning

A really good video here that describes what you want with resolutions of 300 by 300
see the video
http://www.lib.unc.edu/reference/eref/scandemo/fujitsu_book.html

scratch that ,first page came out at 17megs and that was at 300dpi,so a little trial and error is called for i think.

Can you not use OCR to get the text then scan in any pictures seperately?

Or convert to greyscale and only use colour for images.

I normally use 100-150dpi

Ideal for quick, good quality scanning.

The file size is usually around 1mb per jpg